


Love Letters

by fengirl88



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Love_bingo, Multi, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-23
Updated: 2011-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:08:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/pseuds/fengirl88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're not always on paper and some of them aren't even in words.  But they're love letters just the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Letters

**Author's Note:**

> written for the love_bingo prompt square "love letter". Thanks to blooms84 for the beta.

Anthea chooses the biggest Jiffy bag she can find, but she still has to cram everything in. Letters, cards, dozens of postcards with pictures of familiar places they'd visited together; the sum of two and a half years. She doesn't let herself read them, knows too many of them by heart. Passionate declarations, bitter reproaches, desperate apologies and pleas for forgiveness, promises of amendment.

It all comes to the same in the end. The skill of words used to seduce, to hurt, to bind. Enough now. Return to sender. She writes a short sentence on a slip of paper, shoves it in and seals the envelope. Takes it to the post, her heart hammering.

Later he'll say it was all just so much waste paper, it could have gone in the bin, what was the point in sending it back? She'll know then that her aim was true, feel a weary satisfaction in another job well done.

When she goes into the office the next day, Mycroft raises an eyebrow and she nods: _case closed_. No need for further action.

She's finally free of the man, and she'll cherish her freedom from now on, deflecting unsuitable advances with a vague smile.

Not so easily tempted any more. One crazy writer is enough to last anyone a lifetime.

 

***

“Found these when I was clearing out my mum's house,” Lestrade says, holding out the sheaf of flower collages.

Mycroft puts on his specs for a proper look.

“Pretty,” he says. “Did she do them herself?”

“I think my dad must have done them,” Lestrade says.

The inscription on the back of each sheet says “ML from GS”. He doesn't know what the S stands for, but he assumes the G is the same as his own first name. The writing's a big scrawl, looks like someone who doesn't write much, maybe isn't too comfortable with writing. She'd never told him who his dad was, said they didn't need him and he was better off not knowing.

“Intricate,” Mycroft says. “It must have taken a long time to do all these.”

“There's supposed to be a language of flowers, isn't there?” Lestrade says. “It's all Greek to me.”

Mycroft goes over to the low bookcase by the window and pulls out a little hardback, red cloth binding, nice bit of gilding on the spine.

“This was my grandmother's,” he says.

“Keen on flowers?” Lestrade asks.

“Flowers, and codes,” Mycroft says, and there's a warmth in his voice Lestrade never hears when he's talking about his family.

They sit quietly together on the sofa, looking from the collages to the book and back again, reading a history that's only partly visible, as the afternoon turns into evening.

 

***

In Afghanistan you longed for letters, longed for them and dreaded them, in case the next one would be the one that said _it's all over, I can't wait any longer for you, I've met someone else_. John saw what those did to the men who got them, how the fight went out of them for a while, how dangerous that could be.

His own letters home were stiff and uncommunicative, little more than going through the motions. But there was no way to write what it was like out there, and even if you could you wouldn't want to. Didn't want his parents or Harry to be exposed to that. He didn't have anyone else to write to, which he'd thought at the time was probably just as well. Nobody wants to be tied to a partner who's a wreck, after all; and he wouldn't have been much good to anyone, the shape he was in when he first came home.

People think it's all e-mails now, or texts: that nobody writes letters any more. But that's just a myth.

He stands on the Underground platform at Liverpool Street, waiting for a Circle Line train, with a letter to Sherlock burning a hole in his pocket.


End file.
